In Uganda, the availability of high-resolution datasets is a strong foundation for us
to produce and use poverty-biomass maps. Although several approaches have been
developed to design poverty maps, there has been less effort to develop poverty/
biomass maps. The Ugandan situation is unique because two decades ago, the
country was faced with deteriorating economic, social and environmental conditions.
However today, the social and economic trends have been greatly reversed, but it is
not clear what the implications of these changes are for the natural resource base.
The approach we use to link these problems uses statistical estimation techniques
(small area estimation) to overcome the typical limitations in the geographic coverage
of household welfare that surveys provide and the lack of welfare indicators in
the census data, and includes biomass information to assess these changes.